Web-based deal advertising companies offer deals to consumers with incentives to use centralized server-based social networking sites. One of the limitations of these approaches is that the deals are offered by stores and advertised by deal advertising companies, or the stores themselves, without knowledge of the location of their subscribed members and other shoppers. The location of a person, however, may be important in brick and mortar shopping, since people are more likely to buy from stores that are in their close proximity. Another limitation of current deal advertising approaches is that they use traditional social networking where the deal is recommended or forwarded to one's friends. However, most of those friends may not be physically near the recommended stores. On the other hand, if a person is near a deal store then there may be many other shoppers nearby that are not his/her friend but who may be looking for similar deals and coupons.
The proliferation of mobile devices such as smart phones, netbooks and tablet computers has led to a growing need to obtain accurate location information of such devices. Wireless positioning may involve obtaining wireless signals and processing the signals into a location estimate. The typical information used for positioning, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) signals, may be processed to find the position of a wireless device. For example, triangulation may be used where multiple range or angle measurements from known positions are used to calculate the position of a device.
The location-aware systems may differ in terms of accuracy, coverage, cost of installation, and maintenance of the systems. The GPS systems may use satellite signals and work in outdoor environments. However, they require direct line of sight and do not work well in an indoor environment. Cell tower triangulation is another method that uses signals from cellular towers to locate a wireless user. This method may also be limited in accuracy and reliability because of the coarse number of cell towers from a particular service provider that a mobile user can communicate with, as well as multipath issues.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.